How Trump is complicating McCarthy's efforts
When a group of House Republicans thwarted Speaker Kevin McCarthy's attempt at averting a government shutdown, he fumed that he was being stymied by lawmakers who wanted to “burn the whole place down.”
But he spared any public ire for the most powerful member of his party who has been encouraging a shutdown: former President Donald Trump.
“I'd shut down the government if they can't make an appropriate deal, absolutely,” Trump said on NBC's “Meet the Press.”
On his social media website, Truth Social, Trump went further, suggesting Sunday that Republicans should dig in because President Joe Biden, in Trump's view, will take the blame.
“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be blamed for the Budget Shutdown,” he wrote. “Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!”
Trump's view of how shutdowns work was shaped by his own experience as president, when the longest government shutdown in history took place from December 2018 to January 2019. He incurred the public blame for it, as he publicly embraced the idea of a shutdown while holding contentious talks about a budget agreement with two Democratic leaders, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and the House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi of California.
“I'll be the one to shut it down,” Trump told the leaders in a contentious Oval Office meeting in December 2018 shortly before the shutdown. “I will take the mantle. And I will shut it down for border security.”
There is no reason to believe that Biden would be granted outsize blame, if any at all, for a shutdown that a group of Republican holdouts in Congress are encouraging. McCarthy has privately noted what Trump said publicly at the time in 2018, according to a person with knowledge of McCarthy's comments.
In an earlier post on Truth Social, Trump suggested that he believed the shutdown could “defund” the federal investigations he's facing, although people have told him that such a belief was not likely to become reality, according to a person briefed on the conversation.
Trump's eagerness to push for chaos has only gone so far, however: The former president has not been calling lawmakers to try to push a shutdown.
Yet McCarthy, whom Trump supported at the last minute when he ran for speaker, is facing an existential threat to his leadership, with his Republican critics looking to force him from his role amid the calamity of a likely shutdown.
Aides to McCarthy and Trump declined to comment. People close to both men maintain that the looming government shutdown was not a strain on their relationship nor was it a sign of a bigger rift. Nonetheless, a person close to Trump acknowledged that his support for a shutdown was providing encouragement to McCarthy's adversaries.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a leading supporter of a shutdown, said in an interview that one of Trump's posts on social media endorsing a shutdown may have had an influence on some members of Congress.
“I think there might have been a few people on the fence who were persuaded by that statement,” Gaetz said. “I view that as consequential.”
Yet Trump is not being faulted, at least overtly, for his stance. In Congress, some Republicans dismissed the notion that Trump could do something to push Gaetz and his allies in the other direction, away from a shutdown.
“I think it certainly helps with some of these folks when they hear from the former president, like during the speaker negotiations or the debt ceiling,” said Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. But he said it was Gaetz who was “creating a crisis.”
A person close to Trump maintained that the former president did not view the situation in terms of helping McCarthy nor did he view the speaker as being especially imperiled.